© MALENE LANDGREEN, Color State, 2009
Photo © Anders Sune Berg - Courtesy Kunsthal Charlottenborg
” Proportions are crucial both in our minds and in our surroundings, where as visual or mental presences they establish harmonies and connections that involve both thoughts and feelings. Art allows complete idealism and can suggest what life could be like as opposed to what it is. Proportions are specific and identifiable – they accentuate time and space. Forms and colours capture our attention and take hold of us. And they can do something special in relation to each other. In their simplest form colours are infinite quantities.” -- Malene Landgreen.
Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen has invited Malene Landgreen to use six exhibition rooms for a combined total installation. Landgreen paints directly on the walls in an energyfilled, colour-intense sequence of installations that unfold in different ways from room to room, thus transforming the architecture and our experience of the body in space.
© MALENE LANDGREEN, Color State, 2009
Photo © Anders Sune Berg- Courtesy Kunsthal Charlottenborg
COLOR STATE is a total installation that moves through six rooms in Kunsthal Charlottenborg’s north wing as an integrated sequence. Malene Landgreen has moved far beyond the conventional frames of painting. We witnessed this most recently in the to the wall exhibition in Kunsthal Charlottenborg and at Arena in Arhus Kunstbygning, where Landgreen’s work unfolded over several walls. With her enduring, site-specific projects at places such as Alborg Airport, Novo Nordisk, Frederiksberg Gymnasium and Danmarks Radio City in Orestaden, Landgreen has painted on the grand scale and established herself as one of the most sought-after artists in Denmark when it comes to focussing on our everyday surroundings.
Colours are Malene Landgreen’s vocabulary, and it is through their relations to volume that she ‘speaks out’. She invites us to a dialogue in potential mental spaces where there is room for the spectator. In Kunsthal Charlottenborg, too, her art sets up an interplay between the architecture, the space and the light. Here the space, the building and the art are unfolded and new abstract stories told that enclose the body as if one had entered an enormous book about the artist.
© MALENE LANDGREEN, Color State, 2009
Photo © Anders Sune Berg.
Courtesy Kunsthal Charlottenborg
Photographs by Anders Sune Berg are published in the exhibition’s catalogue.
" My work derives meaning from the fact that the uncertain, abstract, unformulated, chaotic and inharmonious, no less than the well-ordered, well-considered and flawless, always relates proportionally to something else. No matter how incomprehensible and ungraspable it might be, indeed precisely because it is. It’s all about relations and proportions. That applies in art, in architecture and in life”, says Malene Landgreen.
MALENE LANDGREEN: Born in Copenhagen in 1962. Lives and works in Berlin and Copenhagen.
Educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Art 1984-1991. M.A. at the RDAA 1992-1994.
New and ongoing in situ projects:
2009: New post office sorting house in Oslo, Norway
2009: VM pavilion 2011, Oslo, Norway
2008 – 2010 Total decoration of Ballerup Town Hall
2008 Vestforbrændingen
Catalogue: The project is accompanied by a publication in Danish and English with texts by Vibeke Petersen M.A. and Lars Bent Petersen, painter and lecturer at the Royal Danish Academy of Art. Photos by Anders Sune Berg. The catalogue will come out slightly after the exhibition opening since it will present the finished installation at Kunsthal Charlottenborg.
Kurator: Maria Gadegaard, Acting Director, Kunsthal Charlottenborg
Partner: Peter J. Lassen, Montana
MALENE LANDGREEN
COLOR STATE
5 December 2009 – 21 February 2010
Kunsthal Charlottenborg
Nyhavn 2
1051 Copenhagen K
Tel. +45 3313 4022 / +45 3336 9050
Station: Kongens Nytorv / Bus: 1A, 15, 19, 26, 350S
Opening hours : Tuesday to Friday 12 pm to 8 pm. Saturday and Sunday 12 pm to 5 pm. Closed Mondays.
More to come about Art in Copenhagen and in Denmark in Wanafoto.
